


Cold

by Dracoduceus



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Based on a Tumblr Post, Cold, M/M, Mutual Pining, Sharing a Bed, abandoned cabins, huddling together for warmth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-28
Updated: 2018-04-28
Packaged: 2019-04-28 20:13:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,770
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14456874
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dracoduceus/pseuds/Dracoduceus
Summary: At the last minute, Hanzo and McCree were pulled from their previous mission and sent to Colorado. They were told that there would be supplies at their new location......there weren't.With a blizzard coming in and the temperature dropping, they needed to get warm somehow.





	Cold

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Nickutried](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nickutried/gifts).



> I saw [a post](http://nickutried.tumblr.com/post/173211819812/hey-psssst-fanficwriters-hey-yes-its-your) on tumblr about sharing a bed and body heat tropes. 
> 
> Also, special thanks to [Lyall_Lupa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lyall_Lupa/pseuds/Lyall_Lupa) for putting up with my whining about how distracted I was getting while writing this. It kind of got away from me.

“Colder than a witch’s tit in a brass bra,” McCree muttered as he frowned out the large glass window. He took a deep drag of his cigarillo and blew the smoke out so that it danced along the uneven, dusty, foggy panes. For a moment it obscured the neverending white and greys of the howling storm outside. 

Behind him, Hanzo sniffed - not unlike the way he had when they had shoved open the door to the safe house. “Asinine,” he muttered with a barely-there tremble in his voice. 

McCree glanced behind him and felt a little pang of sympathy for the archer. At the last minute they both had been redirected from their missions but at least Jesse had been slightly more prepared. Winston had assured them both that there were supplies at the safe house and places nearby that they could purchase whatever else they needed.

“This was a mistake,” Hanzo hissed from in front of the little stove, echoing McCree’s own thoughts. His space was shared with damp pieces of wood that steamed faintly as the snow and ice still clinging to them melted. There was a rattle as Hanzo adjusted a piece of wood next to him so that it didn’t dig into his thigh. 

“Yeah,” McCree said and ashed his cigarillo. “How you holding up?” 

Hanzo grunted. “I will live,” he said through gritted teeth. 

McCree wordlessly watched the shiver that shook Hanzo’s body enough that his metal heels rattled against the floor. “Don’t much look like it,” McCree muttered and considered his cigarillo. Keep it for later, or be rid of it? Wrinkling his nose he snuffed it out and left it on the windowsill - if he needed it later, he’d grab it. “I’m gonna see if I can find us more blankets.” 

“Do you think I missed any?” Hanzo asked waspishly from his cocoon. Really it was a thin, scratchy sheet and had been the most that either of them had found. 

McCree grunted. “No, but it don’t hurt to look more.” 

The mountain lodge that Winston sent them to was...small. There was a small kitchen with a wood-fired stove which McCree cautiously poked his head in - it was filled with snow and dust and he sighed as he swung the door shut. He’d hoped to find more dry wood. The plumbing had completely frozen but there was a questionable well outside and an outhouse that was just barely visible through the swirling snow. 

By silent agreement they had done their business quickly before the blizzard had really set in and prepared themselves for a long, uncomfortable night. 

There wasn’t much more to the cabin. Once there had been a bedroom but the windows had broken and they had closed the door as the wind blew in snow and cold. They had shoved an old, dirty rug under the door to keep the draft out as much as they could. The broken window meant that whatever had been in the room was ruined and unusable. Fortunately the stove had worked and there were no breaks in that particular chimney so aside from having to clean out the ash, it had been no problem to get a fire going.

Well,  _ that _ hadn’t been a problem, but the wood had. With no one to prepare the safe house for their stay, there hadn’t been any dry wood to use aside from the few logs already in the cabin and stove; the blizzard had seen to that, infiltrating the covered sides of the cord. Still, McCree and Hanzo had optimistically gathered as much as their arms could carry and laid it out around the stove in hopes that they’d dry before their meagre supply of dry wood ran out. 

The rest of the space was taken up by a wooden bench that looked like it aspired to be a couch (or was perhaps emulating the skeleton of one) and the small supply closet which he and Hanzo had already raided. 

“‘There will be supplies at your location’ my ass,” McCree muttered as he poked around in the closet. He pulled out a pillow that he and Hanzo had overlooked but that was it. “At least there’s food, I guess.” 

Hanzo grunted from where he sat by the fire. “I can’t tell if I should add another log or if I’m just cold,” he growled and the admission surprised McCree as he returned to the circle of light and warmth radiating from the little stove.

“Go ahead,” McCree said as he moved a log so he could sit down. “Fire looks low enough.” 

Hanzo’s hand shook as he reached for the stove but McCree beat him to it, flicking the door open and loading a miserly log in, saying nothing of the way that Hanzo sighed in relief at the wash of heat that poured out. 

“How you doing?” McCree asked softly, trying to ignore the way the red and gold light from the fire danced along Hanzo’s cheeks.

“Cold,” Hanzo grumbled, again surprising McCree with his admission. “I was prepared for  _ Numbani _ , not  _ Siberia _ .” 

McCree snorted. “Pretty sure we’re in Colorado, not Siberia,” he teased gently, reluctantly closing the stove door. He looked at Hanzo. “Need anything?” 

“A blanket,” Hanzo said wistfully, ducking his head under the thin sheet and shivering. 

Thoughtfully, McCree scratched at his beard. He had been fortunate to have slightly heavier gear than Hanzo simply for the fact that it was what he typically wore into combat. Upon being trapped by the storm, the chestplate had come off and he had rolled down the sleeves of his shirt as much as he was able to. He touched the serape around his shoulders. 

“Come on,” he said and nudged Hanzo. “Let’s get ready for bed.” 

Hanzo scowled at McCree and they both eyed the scuffed, dusty, dirty hardwood flooring. “I’ll stay awake,” he said and shivered. 

“Ain’t no one going out in this weather; let’s get some shuteye while we can.”

Beside him Hanzo shivered suddenly and explosively. “I don’t think I can sleep,” he admitted around chattering teeth.

McCree grunted. “C’mon,” he repeated. “Let’s get situated, then.” He added another log to the stove, leaving the door open a little longer so that the two of them could bask in its warmth for a moment; then he nudged the archer next to him until he stumbled to his feet.

“What are you doing?” Hanzo hissed when McCree tugged on the blanket.

“We’re laying that on the ground,” McCree explained as patiently as he was able to. “Won’t be much but it’ll be a little bit of insulation from the cold ground.”

Hanzo scowled at him. “What do you think you’re doing?” he hissed.

“We’re laying that on the ground,” McCree repeated and lifted his free hand to pluck at the serape around his neck. “This makes a better blanket.”

For a long moment Hanzo’s eyes were trained on the serape as if weighing his options. Then he said, “It isn’t very large.”

Unable to help himself, McCree joked, “It ain’t about size.” Hanzo squinted his eyes at him as if deciding where to stab him despite the light dusting of pink on his cheeks. Perhaps it was a little much too much to hope that they were from his silly joke; more likely it was from the cold that was creeping ever closer. “Naw, but it’ll be enough to cover the both of us if…” he trailed off, unable to meet Hanzo’s eyes. He coughed.

“If we share,” Hanzo finished grimly, the way that he did when he spotted another sniper in the field or spoke to his brother – like it was an unpleasant chore or annoyance that required his attention.

“It will be warmer,” McCree added hurriedly when Hanzo made no move. “And…”

“Men like us aren’t used to comfort,” Hanzo murmured when McCree trailed off. His head dipped further into his thin cocoon and he took a deep breath. “Very well,” he said and slowly pulled the blanket off as if reluctant to give it up. McCree could sympathize.

He watched Hanzo as he carefully laid the thin sheet down while he toed off his boots. Seeing Hanzo shivering, McCree stopped and unwound his serape, shaking it out and offering it to Hanzo.

Without the heavy weight of the wool over his shoulders, McCree shivered and hurried to tug his shoes off and set them near the stove. Turning, he found Hanzo already cocooned in the serape though his nose was wrinkled.

As McCree gingerly lay himself down, now beginning to shiver, he had a breathless thought that Hanzo might not allow him closer but that moment passed when the archer – clearly with great reluctance – lifted one edge of the serape in invitation.

He awkwardly scooted closer so that the edges draped over his side, the only way that they would be able to fit together under his serape. It left a strip of his back still exposed to the cold air and he hissed at the sensation of a draft that drew icy fingers up his spine. 

Hanzo clicked his tongue derisively and shifted closer, bunching the thin sheet between them with his movement. He was close enough now to McCree that he could see the way Hanzo’s eyelashes brushed his cheeks and the exact shade of red on his cheeks from the cold. 

His breath hitched when Hanzo scowled and leaned over him. Hanzo froze and looked down. “Your hand,” he hissed. “ _ Is cold. _ ”

Swallowing, Jesse realized as Hanzo reached over him for the discarded pillow, his prosthetic hand was in contact with the strip of skin revealed as Hanzo shifted. He yanked it back just as Hanzo dragged the dusty pillow over his face before wedging it between them and under their heads. 

It was awkward - each of them took one side of the small pillow which put their faces uncomfortably close. With the fire nearby and the serape over them, it was...almost cozy. But the wind that still leaked in from beneath the bedroom door still howled.

Hanzo shivered and preparing himself to be stabbed, McCree cautiously reached toward him. “I’m fine,” he snapped, flinching away. 

“Look,” McCree growled, annoyed despite his earlier languor. It was probably the cold. “We both ain’t fine.” This time when he reached for Hanzo he flinched but didn’t pull away. “It’s cold - cold as…” he cleared his throat, closing his mouth on the idiom that Hanzo would only tell him was asinine. “We’re gonna freeze,” he said. “And we don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow - we don’t have the luxury of not sleeping.” 

Hanzo’s eyes were calculating as he seemed to weigh the truth of McCree’s words. “I’ve managed through worse,” he bit out. “And your hand  _ is cold _ .”

Scowling, McCree lifted his arm and with a quick twist disengaged it, letting the prosthetic drop with a heavy  _ clank _ to the bricks by the stove. He shoved his stump around Hanzo’s waist and yanked him closer until they were pressed as awkwardly as two men could be from sternum to knee. “Better?”

With a last scowl, Hanzo hesitantly wrapped his arms around McCree’s waist in turn and seemed to relax. McCree awkwardly settled the serape around the two of them and pressed his nose to Hanzo’s hair, counting the breaths until Hanzo’s shivers gradually died down. 

There in front of the stove, with the wind howling and beating on the walls and windows of a tiny little cabin in the middle of nowhere, they silently basked in the warmth of the other’s body. “You’re so warm,” Hanzo mumbled into the little cocoon they had entangled themselves in. 

McCree hummed, his nose pressed to Hanzo’s hair. It smelled like sweat and stale from air travel and only very faintly like the generic shampoo that the Watchpoint buys in bulk. 

_ I could get used to this _ , is the last thought that McCree remembers before he falls into slumber.

* * *

When Jesse woke up the next morning, he was warm, comfortable, and wrapped completely around Hanzo. Sometime in the middle of the night they had entangled their legs so that they were pressed together from collarbone to ankle with the serape and sheets tangled around them. 

At some point someone - probably Hanzo because McCree didn’t remember doing it - had added another log or two to the stove. The other man appeared to still be asleep and McCree blinked down at him in the early morning sunlight. 

“Is that your gun, cowboy?” Hanzo asked, his voice thick and raspy with sleep and muffled by the way it was smushed up into McCree’s chest. “Or are you just happy to see me?”

They seemed to realize exactly what he said at the same moment and sprung apart as if burned. 

Clearing his throat, McCree scrambled to his feet and adjusted his jeans as subtly as he could manage. He stretched out as much as he could, working the kinks out of his neck and back from a night on the hardwood floor. “Looks like the storm’s died down,” he said and peered out the windows. “Don’t look like we’re getting anywhere though.”

The next unpleasant surprise came when they tried to open the door and found a waist-high mound of snow shoved against it by the wind. Fortunately the blizzard had died sometime during the night and now the sky was scrubbed clear and sunlight bounced off the mounds of fresh snow.

“Alright,” McCree said, squinting out into the field and forest surrounding the little cabin. The footpath was only visible by the little pink plastic streamers wrapped or bolted to the trees and even those hadn’t really escaped a light dusting of snow. “I’m gonna go see if I can’t find a shovel or something in the shed,” McCree said, shading his eyes with one hand and pointing with his other to the half-buried shed.

“I cannot go out,” Hanzo said churlishly, eyeing the snow with a moue of disgust. The serape was wrapped around his shoulders against the gentle breeze that whisked through the trees.

McCree said nothing for a moment as he surveyed the yard. “Alright,” he agreed at last and palmed his chest and pockets for a smoke before remembering the half-finished cigarillo he left on the windowsill. McCree could feel Hanzo’s eyes boring into the back of his head as he fetched it, brushing off the dust that had somehow managed to accumulate overnight. Turning, he eyed the serape around Hanzo’s shoulders. “Keep that,” he said roughly. I’ll manage.”

His first course of action was to slog through the snow toward the wood pile. The old vinyl covering the sides of the cord had kept snow from piling in but they were all still very wet. He made three trips, knocked on the door for Hanzo to collect the piles, and then trudged toward the shed.

Halfway there he remembered his cigarillo (despite it being clenched between his teeth as the snow began to soak his pants) and he cupped his hands around the flame of his lighter to keep the wind from extinguishing it. “Gonna freeze my dick off,” he muttered to himself as he tucked the lighter away and took a deep drag of the cigarillo. Even that short moment of stillness was catching up and the cold was biting at his legs from the knee down. He did his best to ignore the nip of the cold and the burn of it where his skin touched the metal of his prosthetic and shuffled onward.

With the snow so deep he had a difficult time clearing a path for the door to open but he managed after some creative cursing and a little bit of elbow grease. He was pleased to find a few stacks of wood that seemed dry enough and a basket which he could use to carry it sitting just inside the door as if the house’s previous occupant had been preparing to do just what McCree intended.

Closing the door behind him, McCree looked around. The rest of the shed seemed like a more or less even split between a woodworking shop and a garden shed. He found a few snow shovels and a few pairs of heavy cloth gloves that Hanzo could probably use to keep warm – the leather glove on McCree’s flesh hand was sufficient for him even if the snow was slowly starting to melt and soak through it.

It took a few trips back and forth for McCree to take his prizes back to the house but by the time he did Hanzo had stirred awake the fire again, using a few more logs from the dry pile that McCree had found, until the cabin was almost comfortably warm.

When he was done ferrying supplies, he used the shovel to make a more bearable path to the outhouse where he quickly did his business with chattering teeth. Cleaning himself up as well as he was able to, McCree trudged back to the cabin with the shovel over his shoulder.

“It looks like there used to be a fan here,” Hanzo said absently, pointing to the top of the stove as McCree stomped his feet just outside of the door to get rid of the snow. “It probably would have given the fire better circulation and would blow the warm air around.” He looked ridiculous wrapped in McCree’s serape like a cloak and the gunslinger tried valiantly to  _ not _ think about how good Hanzo looked in his colors.

Instead he let the annoyance flare up in him with the realization that while McCree was doing the hard work, Hanzo had remained warm and dry in the cabin. “I’m soaked,” he said.

Hanzo glanced at him and nodded. He reached for a small bundle beside the stove and handed it to McCree, who found it was warm from its proximity to the fire. “I found these in the bedroom,” he said and looking down the hall, McCree saw that there were puddles of slush and melted snow that hadn’t been there when he left. “They should be sufficient, at least until your other clothes can dry.”

Grunting, McCree immediately stripped his glove off and let it fall beside the stove with a wet, almost fleshy sound. He began fiddling with his belt and was far too pleased – perhaps a bit vindictively – to see Hanzo’s cheeks flare pink before he pointedly turned away.

“Winston called while you were out,” he added as he dug through the cupboards, keeping his back toward McCree.

“Shame,” McCree grumbled, focusing on peeling his wet boots, socks, and pants off. “I had a few things to say to him.”

Hanzo snorted though his back was still to McCree so he couldn’t see his expression. “I may have been a bit…short with him. Especially when he informed me that the secondary team they sent not only was delayed by the storm but had also managed to catch up to our target.”

“So they completed our mission,” McCree said with the same deadly calm he had during Deadeye.

“Yes,” Hanzo said, fetching a pot for the collection of canned goods he had piled on the counter in the kitchen. “It gets better.”

McCree snorted, laying his jeans out on the floor in front of the fire. The bundle proved to be a pair of sweatpants with a sizeable hole in the side near the hip but everything was covered and he wasn’t even that self-conscious anyway. Despite the warmth from the pants – as if he had pulled them on straight out of the dryer in the Watchpoint laundromat – McCree groaned. “With a vacation like this, how can it get better?”

“There are high winds still in the area,” Hanzo said grimly as he methodically opened the cans. “The  _ Orca _ cannot come to pick us up until tomorrow afternoon – it’s simply too dangerous.”

For a long moment McCree was still, both dreading and looking forward to another cold night in front of the fire. “Another night.”

“Another night,” Hanzo confirmed. He waved the pot over his shoulder. “I’m going to rinse this off.” McCree snorted and watched him open the door and leave. 

_ He really did look lovely in McCree’s serape _ .

Shaking the thought out of his head, McCree busied himself around the abandoned cabin. It didn’t matter what he thought of the archer because at the end of the day, a scruffy cowboy like McCree would always be found wanting in the eyes of a man like Hanzo. 

That night they had more blankets and musty pillows which Hanzo had found in a closet in the bedroom but when the wind started howling, Hanzo didn’t need any prompting to drift closer. They said nothing about how closely they curled together despite the blankets. 

They didn’t comment on the way their legs tangled together or the way that McCree tucked his face into Hanzo’s neck or the way that Hanzo carded his fingers through McCree’s tangled and messy hair. 

As the wind howled outside Hanzo admitted that the cold bit at the metal plates of his legs and because McCree felt less for not sharing something, he admitted his fascination with Hanzo in his serape and how lovely he thought the red looked against Hanzo’s skin. 

“I like it too,” Hanzo murmured into his hair and they fell silent as the cold closed in on them and the wind continued to howl. “It smells like you.” 

* * *

The next morning they are woken by the comms ringing and the encroaching cold and spring apart again. 

Within an hour they were dressed and ready to be picked up and McCree had his serape back around his shoulders as if it had all been a cruel dream. 

“Rough night, loves?” Tracer asks as they climbed the ramp to the  _ Orca _ . 

McCree rolled his eyes with an ease he didn’t really feel. “Understatement,” he grumbled. “I need a hot shower.”

They didn’t speak again during the trip back and only nodded at each other when they parted ways at the Watchpoint. 

Still, when night fell and he was contemplating the emptiness of his room, Hanzo was surprised to hear a knock at his door. On the other side was McCree, dressed in a pair of sleep shorts and a faded tee. He fiddled nervously with his hat and swallowed hard. “It’s cold,” he said. 

For a long moment Hanzo regarded him without expression and McCree  _ doubted _ .

Then Hanzo’s face softened into a smile as he stepped aside. He closed the door behind McCree. 

**Author's Note:**

> As always, please feel free to come and yell at/with me on tumblr, [classywastelandbread](https://classywastelandbread.tumblr.com)!
> 
> :D
> 
> ~DC


End file.
